


Moritat

by thatyourefuse



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Backstory, Canon-Typical Amorality, Canon-Typical Extremely Questionable Parenting, Canon-Typical Implied Violence, Canon-Typical Unreliable Narration, Class Issues, Epistolary, F/F, Gertrude Robinson does not know how to human being: film at 11, Mary Keay Is Her Own Warning, Mary Keay is also SUPER EXTRA, Statement Fic, Swinging London, light canon spackling, slightly more than canon-typical implied sex but honestly not very much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-21
Updated: 2020-02-21
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:21:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22824766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatyourefuse/pseuds/thatyourefuse
Summary: Case number 0131227. Gertrude Robinson, concerning some details of her relationship with Mary Keay, beginning in late 1964.Statement recorded directly to tape, 27th of December, 2013.
Relationships: Mary Keay/Gertrude Robinson
Comments: 15
Kudos: 45





	Moritat

_Case number 0131227. Gertrude Robinson, concerning some details of her relationship with Mary Keay, beginning in late 1964._

_Statement recorded directly to tape, 27th of December, 2013._

She _was_ beautiful, you know. 

I can't conceive of a more irritating way to begin a statement, particularly _this_ statement, particularly here and now. It doesn't shed any light on anything; and if or when Gerard ever comes across this tape, he's likely to be annoyed most of the way to death. I've watched his face while various elder statesmen of the occult scene waxed poetic about what a hell of a woman his mother was, even the ones who weren't visibly working to redact the details of some tawdry physical encounter. I'll try to keep that sort of nostalgia to the barest possible minimum, but -- Gerard, if you are listening past this point, don't say I never warned you. 

She was beautiful. It wasn't something I said to her terribly often. She wasn't the sort of person you want to encourage unnecessarily, and I wouldn't say we precisely had that sort of relationship.

I first met Mary Keay in the autumn of 1964. I suppose that would have made her eighteen to my nineteen, assuming I decide to take either her word or her birth certificate at face value -- I'm not as confident in either as I might ordinarily be, but I never had specific reason to doubt her, and it never particularly mattered one way or another. It was at some God-awful party in Clapham, where I'd been dragged along by a friend of an ex-lover of an acquaintance, or something on those lines, who'd sworn up and down that an old associate of Aleister Crowley might put in an appearance. In reality, of course, merely a loose assembly of too many slovenly people drinking too much bad red wine, smoking too much bad cannabis, and listening to too many jazz records -- of varying quality and condition. I remember the walls were painted a drippy and unattractive shade of violet, and I was already preparing to recall an essay due the next morning by the time I first noticed the girl by the record player. 

I will try not to go into raptures at this juncture. She had a great deal of long dark hair and was wearing a black dress with an extremely short skirt, even by the standards of 1964 -- I'd quite taken to the mini-skirt myself by that point, as being just under five foot one I'd spent my long-skirted school years looking unfortunately like a lampshade, but she was somewhat over that height and there was a rather daring amount of skinny leg on display in vivid red tights. That knife-slash of a mouth was painted nearly white, and she wore very heavy eye makeup with two or three sets of false lashes anchored onto it at once. I think half the girls in there must have been gotten up the same way, to variously unfortunate effect, but she had the bones as well as the sheer self-possession to carry it off rather successfully. 

When I saw her first, she was just putting something on the record player -- I'd like to convince myself it wasn't Lotte Lenya singing "Mack the Knife," but of course it was, and in the original German at that. As she came back towards the center of the room, her walk seemed to be more of a swaying dance, with her cigarette tracing blood-swirls of smoke in the air. None of that affectation was at all out of the ordinary at that sort of party, of course. What _was_ slightly unusual was the way the crowd seemed to draw away from her almost imperceptibly on all sides -- it wasn't conspicuous, as these things go. It was just that wherever she set foot, there wouldn't quite be anyone there, as though the air around her had a kind of surface tension to it. 

Her eyes went over the room like searchlights. I could feel them come to rest on me, although for the life of me I had no idea why. I still don't. The most she could ever tell me was what she believed to have been the truth, twenty or thirty or forty years later. Perhaps it was just that I didn't know any better than to stare back. 

I remember that she approached me as though we'd been friends long, long ago -- in infant school, perhaps, or in a previous life. I don't remember precisely what she said, but I do know her voice came as something of a surprise. That sibilant, insinuating East End. It wasn't an accent most of the girls there would have flaunted the way she did, and… she sounded _old_ , is still as far as I can describe it. Old and jaded. It was a young woman's voice, but I would have believed she'd been a young woman for quite a long time. 

We left there together after about half an hour. It sounds somewhat indecently hasty to me now, given how things eventually were between us, but at the time it was hardly a pick-up, at least not to my knowledge. I may have made an interesting new acquaintance, but it didn't make me any less keen to escape that nasty little violet room, and Mary simply took it for granted that she'd be accompanying me. I didn't object. When we reached the street outside, she put her arm through mine. Her stride was naturally quite long, I remember, and curtailing it to match mine didn't seem to come naturally to her, but before long we found ourselves washed up in an unfortunate all-night cafe, eating egg and chips while she interrogated me still in that hissing half-whisper about my experiences with what I would then have called the occult, which she casually referred to as _the real world_. 

I _was_ , in fact, beginning to see why the other partygoers had given her something of a wide berth. I can't say for certain that I liked her, even then, but I certainly found her interesting, and I can make the educated guess that I was strongly attracted to her almost at first sight. I know I somehow liked watching her eat -- ravenous in a rather vulgar way, yet at the same time quite fastidious, like a cat cleaning its whiskers after gutting a mouse.

If I'm honest with myself, I suppose it's somewhat more than an educated guess. I didn't think of myself as having much sex drive at the time, however, and what there was of it I assumed to be broadly normal. 

Yes. I know. All I can say is that I may not be the only person for whom the early sixties were a hell of a time for self-ignorance. 

We talked until sunrise, that first evening, over innumerable greasy cups of tea. I half convinced myself I was simply waiting until the hours of daylight before setting out to find my way home, but it was more than that; and when I found her smoking on the pavement outside my flat a few days later, I simply asked her where she had it in mind to go. 

Mary was… well. To put the finest possible point on it, by the time I went home on that first night, she was already the single most irritating woman I'd ever known; but there was a fascination about her. Much of it, I dare say, somewhat discreditable by modern enlightened standards. She wasn't at all what I would have called an educated person -- her grasp of basic sums could only ever be described as _idiosyncratic_ , and outside certain startling areas her history was more or less nil -- but I lived in a dreary first-floor flat with three other educated young ladies, very daring we all thought ourselves for venturing outside the halls of residence, and they had begun to bore me rigid. Mary was _knowledgeable_ in a queer, monomaniacal, stubborn way I'd never encountered before, although frequently enough since. 

I still remember the way she laughed at me when I realized she read and wrote considerably better Latin than I did. Mary always did know more or less what other people thought of her. I certainly knew what my family and fellow students would have thought of her, and I'd be lying if I said that wasn't part of the attraction. It was a useful era for that spiv-mystic glamour she always cultivated, and she always did play it to the hilt. 

When I was finally invited back to _her_ flat, it was a condemnable little room with a washroom down the corridor, above a grubby bookshop in Soho. She worked in the shop a few days a week -- and hinted airily at other, unspecified services -- in lieu of rent; generally either peddled or lived on stolen Benzedrine inhalers; and instantly converted all her pocket money, as she called it, into dresses and rare books. We'd known one another two and a half weeks the first time I saw her put a brick through a car windscreen, and a month the first time I saw her cut a man's face open. He was a drunk pestering her on a street corner, and as far as I know she'd never laid eyes on him before in her life. She had better methods of dealing with the people she _knew_ who'd crossed her, and after a while I found out about some of those as well. She had something of a vividly medieval imagination in such matters. It was an education.

I'm sure that's the point at which I should have tiptoed back to my orderly little life, all things considered, but there are two things I'll always be grateful to Mary Keay for teaching me. One of them was to win a fight by hitting first, hitting grotesquely hard, and then running like hell before anyone else can work out what's just happened. The other, she taught me on her moth-eaten chaise longue -- and her floor, and her bureau, and her table -- in that one dreadful room in Soho, and the lessons went on considerably longer. Quite a few things about myself became apparent to me the first time she made me angry enough to get a fistful of that long dark hair and _pull_. 

To anyone still listening, that _was_ the barest possible minimum.

Perhaps the most startling thing about our adventures was how comparatively little they affected the rest of my life. My degree work never really suffered. I eventually had to part ways with my flatmates, of course, but I found myself a classmate whose turbulent affair with a married man kept her away half the time and too preoccupied the other half to care whether or not I came in at four A.M. with lipstick on my neck, reeking of gin and various types of unsavory smoke. I've never needed much in the way of sleep, and with a little forethought it was always possible to cram my essays and revision into the nights Mary was otherwise occupied. In the end, I finished university with an ironclad liver, a frankly irresponsible level of comfort with the uncanny demi-monde, and quite a respectable upper second. 

It was Mary, of course, who introduced me to the Magnus Institute. 

I think I realized even then how she'd always been haunted by the place. Her mother, also Mary Keay, had worked there until her death a few years before, and -- well, in those days I had a tendency to drift away when Mary started in on her noble ancestors and the manifold inheritances Jonah Magnus had allegedly done them out of. To me it all sounded rather like something nasty in the woodshed, and I wasn't shy about telling her so. I probably wouldn't have been even if I'd realized she was broadly accurate about much of it. She _didn't_ need the encouragement to be any more in awe of herself. But I could wish I'd listened more attentively. 

I was rather surprised, having listened at all, the first time I went inside the place -- the files and statements and elliptical scraps of documentation spoke to some dry, precise, pedantic instinct in me, but it never seemed like Mary's style at all. As, in the end, it wasn't. 

Suffice to say, it came as a shock to no one when Mary rather took against me after the dust settled with me established and rising at the Institute, and her decidedly not. I assumed, I still think it's likely to the point of certainty, that she resented me for taking possession of something she'd always thought of as hers by birthright. I don't know what else it could honestly have been. She never implied to _me_ at any time that she might have expected me to choose differently. 

Still, she found her own métier in the end. I won't say we ever really reconciled, but after a while I stopped looking over my shoulder -- and under the bed, and in the back of my wardrobe, and in my bathtub, with a torch in one hand and a butcher's knife in the other, because I _had_ seen what happened to people who crossed Mary -- every time I heard an odd noise in the night. 

After a while longer, she took to hovering in my field of vision again, and eventually she became something not unlike a stray cat: circling round the Institute's rubbish bins for scraps, and in exchange leaving the occasional headless vole on my doormat. 

I did often wonder whether I'd have to put an end to her one day, but -- to be honest, on the scale of dangers I was coming to recognize, she simply didn't much rate. After encountering the Lightless Flame or the Stranger, it was a positive pleasure to deal with one reliably untrustworthy individual. I reminded myself that she wasn't even Jurgen Leitner's only supplier, far from it, and even in her relentless quest for power she made it a point of ego not to fall in too deeply with any of the major forces. Simply never played very well with others, I suppose, and who knows what might have taken her place if I'd removed her? 

I had more than my share of projects and preoccupations over the years, as did she, and I was never privy to her megalomania again on any kind of reliable basis, so I'm still not entirely certain _when_ she first happened to Eric. 

I'm afraid that one outright flabbergasted me at first. As long as I'd known her, and it was past the fifteen-year mark, Mary Keay had taken about as much personal interest in men as the average great white shark takes in the plight of the Welsh coal industry. I still feel quite stupid for not realizing sooner what she had in mind, although I don't know what I would have done about it, other than avoid a nasty shock when she told me she was due in March. Eric certainly wouldn't have listened. Probably hoped it was going to _soften_ her. 

I do rather think she was hoping for a girl. Mary Keay the Third -- it almost doesn't bear thinking of, does it? If she'd been younger, or if medical science had been what it is now, she'd probably have tried again, and God knows where it might have ended up. But she wasn't going to see thirty-five again by the time she did fall pregnant. Gerard didn't give her an easy time -- bright boy -- and well before she left hospital it was pretty apparent that she wasn't having a second go. 

Of course I didn't think much of her as a parent. I told her so, repeatedly, sometimes with reference to those of us who'd be left with the tidying-up if she did manage to raise him into a freelance psychopath -- after all, I reminded her once, the odds were that if he turned in that direction at all, she'd be his inaugural victim, and the rest of us would then have something of a crisis on our hands. 

She said that if I intended to be so nurturing about it, then "Auntie Gertrude" might as well take Sunday dinner with them every week from there on out. That was one of the few times since 1967 she ever managed to genuinely disturb me. It was the way she smiled. And the way she -- h'm, lowered herself out of view -- while still smiling. I declined the invitation, and things between us went on more or less as they had been. 

I did make the occasional effort to get the child welfare authorities involved. _I'm_ not a psychopath, and it never seemed to upset her for very long. Presumably because Mary could run rings round social services in more directions than they knew existed, and I eventually came to agree that any child she'd had with her long enough to absorb her influences was probably in less immediate danger _staying_ with her than out in the wide, unwary world with all the things that bump in the night. I think I probably gambled correctly. I suppose Gerard might be the only one who could really know. At least she remembered to feed and bathe him reliably and didn't actually leave him prey to any of the powers, which is likely more than I could have managed. 

There's too much history there for me to be certain of anything, and I think… I think that if I'd ever been someone who understood what I ought to feel about how things turned out in the end, I might never have met her eyes at that party. 

I did see the pictures of her body. _It_ couldn't resist using me to see them, and I think I would have needed to know anyway. I knew some people were never meant to die easily. It wasn't worse than I could have imagined. 

The pictures didn't prepare me for how she looked the first time I read her page. I'd seen plenty of bodies before, face to face, of people I knew well who didn't die easily. I've created more than a few of them with my own two hands. It's ugly every time, but it's not invariably a mockery. 

All that long hair. She'd gone entirely grey by the end, but she still had masses of it. Still wore it long. Still quite vain of it, really, I think. I wasn't prepared to see her without it. 

Sometimes she looks that way in the dreams now. Sometimes she's a grubby Cockney nine-year-old with blood under her fingernails, clutching her stolen books. Sometimes she's eighteen with mile-long legs and enough liquid eyeliner to paint the Forth Bridge, and sometimes she is as the last time I really saw her -- hawk-faced, bony hands, stained teeth, finally grown into her voice. The smile and the straight razor are her only unchanging attributes. I think she would have appreciated that. 

I think I'm finished with this for now.

**Author's Note:**

> [Lotte Lenya -- Moritat von Mackie Messer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPG9GcykPIY) (For a bookend of Weill goodness that I also listened to obsessively while writing this: [Marianne Faithfull -- Salomon Song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhGQj-IRu4o). I also had Laika's ["Black Cat Bone"](https://youtu.be/UnvvWp_emWU) stuck firmly in my head, but without being able to remember the title or enough of the lyrics to Google it.)
> 
> I am now irretrievably convinced that the Mary Keay mentioned in the tag to "Schwartzwald" (b.1924) is actually the mother (mentioned in "First Edition") of _the_ Mary Keay (b. circa 1946). The dates work, AFAIK that's perfectly congruent with everything we hear in canon, and why WOULDN'T _the_ Mary Keay have been raised by someone who named her kid after herself.
> 
> (is Mary being played by Michelle Gomez just a little bit in my imagination now? YOU DON'T KNOW. [but probably.](https://66.media.tumblr.com/f73b34fc1bec16d9fcc3635b4544bd94/43d891155890f3c4-8f/s500x750/f0b82b9a8540382b8ddc3c3c212f41733b959053.png) either way, [this character design](https://yumbles.tumblr.com/post/186828395483/gertrude-robinson-from-1972-to-2016) is definitely My Gertrude.)


End file.
